“Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies, of God and your enemies, and others besides, whom ye may not know, but whom God doth know.”

This motif—instilling terror in non-Muslims—is repeated in verses such as 3:151 and 8:12:

3:151 “We shall cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve because they ascribe unto Allah partners, for which no warrant hath been revealed. Their habitation is the Fire, and hapless the abode of the wrong-doers.”

8:12 “(Remember) when your Lord inspired the angels, ‘Verily, I am with you, so keep firm those who have believed. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who have disbelieved, so strike them over the necks, and smite over all their fingers and toes.’”

Muhammad reiterates this directive in the most important canonical hadith collection (Sahih Bukhari Volume 4, Book 52, Number 220), stating, “I have been made victorious with terror.”

Furthermore, according to the earliest and most authoritative pious Muslim biography (or “sira’) of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq’s “The Life of Muhammad,” Islam’s prophet ordered the killing of the poet Kaab b. al-Ashraf, for writing “offensive” poetry:

…the Apostle of Allah—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—said, “Who will take care of Ibn al-Ashraf for me?”“I shall,” answered Muhammad b. Maslama, the brother of the Banū Abd al-Ashhal. “I will kill him.”“Do it then, if you can,” he [Muhammad] said.

After the brutal assassination, which Muhammad commissioned, Ibn Ishaq quotes this approving observation from the Muslim assassin:

The Jews were terrified by our attack upon Allahs enemy. And there was not a Jew there who did not fear for his life.

The Koran, hadith, and sira—Islam’s most important foundational sources—thus mandate Islamophobia to be inculcated amongst non-Muslims as a “sacralized” objective.

Why?

Ibn Hudayl a 14th century Granadan author of an important treatise on jihad, elucidated the allowable tactics which facilitated the violent, chaotic jihad conquest of the Iberian peninsula, and other parts of Europe:

It is permissible to set fire to the lands of the enemy, his stores of grain, his beasts of burden – if it is not possible for the Muslims to take possession of them – as well as to cut down his trees, to raze his cities, in a word, to do everything that might ruin and discourage him…[being] suited to hastening the Islamization of that enemy or to weakening him. Indeed, all this contributes to a military triumph over him or to forcing him to capitulate.

And these repeated attacks, indistinguishable in motivation from modern acts of jihad terrorism, like the horrific 9/11/01 attacks in New York and Washington, DC, and the Madrid bombings on 3/11/04, or those in London on 7/7/05, were in fact designed to sow terror. The 17th century Muslim historian al-Maqqari explained that the panic created by the Arab horsemen and sailors, at the time of the Muslim expansion in the regions subjected to those raids and landings, facilitated their later conquest,

Allah thus instilled such fear among the infidels that they did not dare to go and fight the conquerors; they only approached them as suppliants, to beg for peace.

Contemporary validation of this principle of jihad as described by Ibn Hudayl, and al-Maqqari—rooted in the Koran—(for example, verses 3:51, 8:12,and 8:60)—i.e., to terrorize the enemies of the Muslims as a prelude to their conquest—has been provided in the mainstream Pakistani text on jihad warfare by Brigadier S.K. Malik, originally published in Lahore, in 1979. Malik’s treatise was endorsed in a laudatory Foreword to the book by his patron, then Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq, as well as a more extended Preface by Allah Buksh K. Brohi, a former Advocate-General of Pakistan. This text—widely studied in Islamic countries, and available in English, Urdu, and Arabic—has been recovered from the bodies of slain jihadists in Kashmir. Brigadier Malik emphasizes how instilling terror is essential to waging successful jihad campaigns:

Terror struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a means, it is the end in itself. Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy (sic); it is the decision we wish to impose upon him…

“Jehad,” the Quranic concept of total strategy. Demands the preparation and application of total national power and military instrument is one of its elements. As a component of the total strategy, the military strategy aims at striking terror into the hearts of the enemy from the preparatory stage of war…Under ideal conditions, Jehad can produce a direct decision and force its will upon the enemy. Where that does not happen, military strategy should take over and aim at producing the decision from the military stage. Should that chance be missed, terror should be struck into the enemy during the actual fighting.

…the Book [Quran] does not visualize war being waged with “kid gloves.” It gives us a distinctive concept of total war. It wants both, the nation and the individual, to be at war “in toto,” that is, with all their spiritual, moral, and physical resources. The Holy Quran lays the highest emphasis on the preparation for war. It wants us to prepare ourselves for war to the utmost. The test of utmost preparation lies in our capability to instill terror into the hearts of the enemies.

Today, this true doctrinal and historical meaning of Islamophobia has undergone an Orwellian transformation. Our media and political elites, cowering in submission to the cultural jihadist dictates of the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood front groups which dominate institutional American Islam, now claim “Islamophobia” is an unwarranted, even discriminatory fear of Muslims and their creed.